Printing a directory's contents to .txt file

damp sponge

Hi All,

I'm in work at the moment and have been asked to list out a directory in a certain format. Fine says I. But then I check there's over 4000 files in the directory. I'm looking for a freeware program that will list the contents in text file so I can just copy paste into the database. I've downloaded a freeware program called "Karen's Directory Printer"... It's exactly what I need but when I try and access the directory I want I can't find it any where on the network drive. It will only display the first 8 or so network directories, so its kinda useless to me.

I was just gonna copy the directory onto my harddrive and do it from there - but its over 16gigs worth of stuff, I'll be waiting for days trying to get it on here.

Has anyone any suggestions how I can do this?

zAbbo

Open command prompt (start > run > cmd)

dir C:\directory > C:\dir.txt

replace c:\diretory with the location of the folder, this prints the contents into a text file (c:\dir.txt)

You can play around with various dir switches (dir /?) to get the format which suits.

Some links
http://www.easydos.com/dir.html
http://www.computerhope.com/dirhlp.htm
http://www.ahuka.com/dos/lesson12.html
http://www.chami.com/tips/windows/110996W.html
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5035179.html

damp sponge

Thanks man, Got it working. Now its just the small matter of copying and pasting each entry into the database, still must have saved myself a good few hours of trawling through each folder etc...


Thanks again.

zAbbo

what kind of database? surely you can populate it with a script?

damp sponge

Its to go into an excel file so we can check what files we have against another companies file list. They keep these files arranged in different fodlers, whereas I set ours up differently. I'm not in IT myself altough I'm working for a software company - is it easy enough to do up a script to list the paths of the files and place them in excel? Is there like a format/draft I could use? If not I think I'll just leave it, no need to get to complicated - i'm happy with the amount of time I've just saved.

cance

If you want to get the contents of the directory and all sub directories use

dir /s /b >> list.txt

Then import it Into excel using \ as the delimiter